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eMOLT Update 2023-06-30
Sorry for the long radio silence; it’s been a busy month for the
eMOLT team!
This week, Erin and George traveled up to South Bristol, Maine to
begin our Gulf of Maine expansion effort on board the F/V Ella V. It was
great to meet Captain Jamien and work with some new colleagues from the
Maine Lobster Institute. We’re looking forward to installing another
dozen vessels throughout the Mid-Coast and Downeast later this
summer.

George and Cooper headed to Spain in early June to meet with
representatives from a number of fishing-vessel based ocean observing
projects underway around the world, the “Fishing Vessel Ocean Observing
Network”.

While it’s not the biggest program in the world (the Moana Program in
New Zealand has over 300 vessels participating!), eMOLT is one of the
longest running programs along with AdriFOOS (an Italian program working
primarily with midwater trawlers). It was great to compare notes on
hardware, data management, and data use with all of these folks.
For example, our
colleagues in Japan are deploying CTDs (measuring salinity, temperature,
and depth) on commercial fishing gear and delivering forecasts back to
fishermen through a smartphone app.

The UNDERSEE company in
Portugal has developed a surface water monitoring system that attaches
to a vessel’s cooling water intake and delivers information about water
temperature, oxygen, chlorophyll, salinity, and pH to an online
dashboard in real time. They’ve also started working with aquaculturists
in Europe to help monitor water quality around farms.
Back stateside, David Johnson has been deploying temperature probes
at a few different locations just outside of Casco Bay. This past year
he returned to his 22 fathom site and documented the warming that has
occurred there since he left it in 2004. 
Speaking of Casco Bay, Captain Alex Todd (F/V Jacob and Joshua)
deployed another Southern Maine Community College drifter on Friday May
26th. You can see the path of
this unit along with their drifter deployed back in March which
ended up in Ptown a few months later and another experimental one to be
deployed in a few days with plywood sails.
Speaking of drifters, a couple more drifters were deployed in Cape
Cod Bay on 30 May by the 5th grade students from the Meadowbrook
Elementary School aboard the M/V Albatross out of Sesuit Harbor. They
came ashore a week later on the Barnstable and Dennis beaches. Another
unit was deployed by the Sandwich MA USCG folks off Plymouth on 8 June
is headed in the opposite direction. Drifter tracks for the past month
are always posted at https://studentdrifters.org/tracks/drift_X.html
along with four units in Lake Michigan.
On the early morning of 12 May, the miniboat that was deployed by R/V
Neil Armstrong back in November south of New England, approached the
Azorean Island of Graciosa. Cassie and JiM alerted colleagues who have
recovered units there before and, within hours, they rallied their
troups and recovered the unit before it might have crashed on the rocks.
Click here for
the full story.

In late June, a few miniboats came ashore prematurely on New England
soil, the Gryphon
Cruiser on the southern side of Nantucket and the Topsfield
Titan on a small ledge east of the Isle of Haut in Maine. If anyone
has contacts in these areas, please let us know. As of 29 June, we have
not recovered them yet.
On Thursday 18 May, most of the eMOLT crew participated in a session
at the Ocean Race Event in Newport called “Enabling Tools for Citizen
Science in Ocean Data Collection” organized by folks from the European
Marine Observation Data Network. While there were very few in the
audience, we got to meet fellow speakers in person for the first time.
They were associated with OpenCtds, Smart-Buoys, MakerBuoys, and
Sailing4Science.
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Cassie, pictured front and center, set up near URI Grad School of
Oceanography booth and spent most of the week chatting with many tourist
and school groups about her Educational Passages Miniboat Program.
NECOFS Bottom Temperature Forecasts


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All the best, George and JiM
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